Wednesday, November 01, 2006

America Uses Slave Labor to Build the U.S. Embassy in Iraq

No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.

Yes, It's not enough that America institutionalizes and approves torture and kidnapping. Now America is using slave labor to build it's "embassy" in Iraq. The “embassy” is actually intended to be the central Headquarters and spy center of America in the Mid-East. A small city of 21 buildings on 104 acres housing 5.500 people.

This isn't the first time American corporations have used sub-contractors to obtain slave labor. It's been noted numerous times in the past. The pattern is always similar.

Workers are brought in under false pretenses to work in Dubai according to one report. They are often people who owe money. Better known as indentured servants. In order to pay off their debt, they are flown to Baghdad and their passports are confiscated. They are forced to work on the embassy. If they are injured they are given pain pills and told to go back to work. Working on pain pills at high altitudes is dangerous, but hitting the ground from 12 stories up is less painful when you are already injured and high on percodan.

Several months before a U.S. construction foreman named John Owen quit in disgust over what he said was blatant abuse of foreign laborers hired to build the sprawling new U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry witnessed similar events when he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Ore.

Owen's account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry's. Health and safety measures were essentially nonexistent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell, broke his back, and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. "The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness," Owen said.

State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently did nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in "virtual lockdown," Owen said.

Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager whom they accused of harassing them. Owen estimates that 375 laborers were then sent home.

it's not enough that the United States has done the following:

1). Gassing, Napalming Terrorizing Iraqis in Fallujah and razing 75% of the entire city of 300,000 people. 2). Causing the deaths of approximately 655,000 thousand Iraqi men, women and children.

3). Using the American Military to rape, torture and murder Iraqis who were innocent of any crime. Many children among them

4). Invading a sovereign nation illegally and on false pretences.

5). Arbitrarily Destroying hundreds Iraqi Date Palm Groves

6). Abuse and torture of children

7). Fabricating evidence for the war

8). Issuing false reports of actions during the war, including staging and filming of events like the rescue of Jessica Lynch and the phony Hollywood staged capture of Sadaam Hussein.

9). Terrorism of Shock and Awe.

10) Theft and extortion of Iraqi civilians, government and businessmen by organized U.S. Military Mafias and U.S. contractors.

Now Added:

11). Using Slave Labor to build it's embassy.

According to the Christian Science Monitor there are 27 million slaves in the world and America is getting in on the fun.

Modern-day slavery has little of the old South. Of those 27 million, the majority are bonded laborers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal - workers who have given their bodies as collateral for debts that never diminish no matter how many years, or sometimes generations, the enslaved labor on. Cooking the books is an early lesson for slaveholders.

Guess what? These are the people building the American "Embassy".

Not only does the U.S. purchase slaves to work on it's embassy it is a well known fact the U.S.A.purchases people to hold as terrorist slaves in Guantanamo. The only slave labor required is to remain a captive and be used as an example of capture in America's War on Terror. So says Amnesty International.

People who have no connection to terrorism are purchased from bounty hunters selling "terrorists". It's numbers games for the U.S. purchasers who can say they have captured more terrorists and therefore are making America safe. "Terrorists" by almost any independent account are actually innocent people with families who have been turned in by their enemies or enterprising capitalists for profit.

Slavery Is Culturally Embedded in America

The personal history of an individual person cannot be erased or ignored. So it is with Nations and the soul or culture(s) and the institutions that make them up. Everything we do as individual’s stays with us and we become what we have done. What we do forever becomes a part of us. The United States has a centuries long history of Slavery. Slavery has existed for a longer period of time since the settling of this country than since the time it was "abolished". Slavery and the using and abusing, the demeaning of people for profit is still a part of American culture and will always be. It is a cultural trait much like a character trait in an individual. Character traits are not easily changed. Traits are not meant by nature to be easily changed. They are permanent. There will never be any change in the negative character of any nation unless there is a painful realization of the trait i.e. what we are as individuals and as nations.

American Corporations Cannot Distinguish Between Paid and Slave Labor

The Chicago Tribune details how difficult it is for U.S. corporations to make sure that their workers are not slaves. It seems from the logic of the administration that slave labor is very hard to prevent, so we really shouldn't enact any laws preventing it.

The Tribune retraced the journey of 12 Nepali men recruited from poor villages in one of the most remote and impoverished corners of the world and documented a trail of deceit, fraud and negligence stretching into Iraq. The men were kidnapped from an unprotected caravan and executed en route to jobs at an American military base in 2004.

At the time, Halliburton said it was not responsible for the recruitment or hiring practices of its subcontractors, and the U.S. Army, which oversees the privatization contract, said questions about alleged misconduct "by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those firms, as these are not Army issues."

The men were in effect kidnapped twice, once by the contractors to Halliburton through deceit, phony promises of pay and then left vulnerable, hopelessly disoriented in a strange land where the insurgents came upon them and killed them for working for the U.S.. America subcontracts its slavery as it subcontracts it torture.

America has a long history of slavery and it seems at times to want to go back. Old, culturally comfortable habits are not easily or willingly broken. Halliburton’s excuse that it cannot be responsible for its contractors is reminiscent of Bush's blaming the CIA for giving him bad information. The CIA is presented as a subcontractor to the Whitehouse who didn't do their job properly. Bush accepts responsibility.... but not the blame. It's not his fault we invaded Iraq and 655,000 people died so that Iran could take over Iraq and turn it into a fundamentalist Anti U.S. theocracy.

Bush declared zero tolerance for involvement in human trafficking by federal employees and contractors in a National Security Presidential Directive he signed in December 2002 after media reports detailing the alleged involvement of DynCorp

employees in buying women and girls as sex slaves in Bosnia during the U.S. military's deployment there in the late 1990s.

There can be no doubt who the Axis of Evil is comprised of. This nation has been exposed.

It is the very same "Evil" that it accuses Sadaam's Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Iran of being.